The Mysterious Sounds Haunting Australia's Black Mountain No One Can Explain

[00:00:00]People who have stood near Black Mountain at night describe it the same way without coordinating their accounts.

[00:00:08]A low moaning that seems to come from inside the rock rather than across it.

[00:00:14][music] Not wind noise from above, not the rustle of vegetation, but something that appears to emerge from the interior of the formation itself and travel outward [music] through the stone.

[00:00:29]On nights when the wind picks up, the sound changes character, becoming something multiple witnesses over multiple [music] decades have independently compared to howling coming from deep underground.

[00:00:44]On still nights, it drops to something lower and harder to locate, a vibration more felt in the chest than heard through the ears.

[00:00:55]These accounts have been coming in since the first European settlers reached this part of far north Queensland in the 1870s.

[00:01:05]They have continued through every decade since. They are consistent in their core description across people who had no knowledge of each other's reports. and the scientific explanation for what produces them. While partially established does not account for everything that has been documented here, this channel covers ancient Australian history most people were never taught. Subscribe now and new episode only on Spotify link below.

[00:01:41]Let us know in the comments if you have heard this mountain and what it sounded like.

[00:01:48]The sounds at Kajjaka, which the cuckoo yalangi people have known by that name for thousands of years before English speakers called it Black Mountain, fall into three distinct categories that have been separately documented by different researchers and witnesses over the past century and a half.

[00:02:10]The first is the continuous low sound, the moaning or groaning that emanates from the formation during periods of wind. This is the most frequently reported. It appears to increase in intensity as wind speed increases and to change pitch depending on which direction the wind is coming from relative to the boulder formation.

[00:02:35]Multiple accounts from people who have camped at the base of the mountain describe it as persistent enough to prevent sleep. Not because of its volume, but because of its unsettling character. Something about the frequency and the directionlessness of the sound.

[00:02:54]The way it seems to come from everywhere and nowhere simultaneously registers in the listener as wrong before the conscious mind has worked out why.

[00:03:06]The second category is [music] the sudden percussive sounds.

[00:03:12]explosive detonations that have been described by long-term local residents as comparable to a rifle shot or a small blast of dynamite.

[00:03:23]Bert Cummings, who lived near the mountain for many years and whose accounts appear in Morin Kazika's documented research on the site, describe the cause directly.

[00:03:36]When the granite boulders have spent a full day absorbing tropical heat and their surface temperatures have climbed significantly above the surrounding air, a sudden cool tropical downpour hits, the boulders contract rapidly. The pressure differential builds inside the rock until the granite can no longer contain it.

[00:04:01]The boulder cracks or releases builtup stress along an existing fracture and the sound produced can be heard for kilometers in every direction.

[00:04:14]The third category is the most difficult to explain.

[00:04:19]It is also the least often discussed in popular accounts of the mountain.

[00:04:25]Some people who have spent extended time near Kolka Jaka report not just sounds they can hear but sensations in the body that do not correspond to any identifiable audible source.

[00:04:41]A vibration in the chest cavity. A pressure behind the eyes. a sense of unease that does not have a clear origin point, but that intensifies the closer one gets to the boulder formation.

[00:04:57]These accounts have been recorded separately from the moaning and the explosions, describing something distinct from both and the physics behind what might produce them brings us to one of the most interesting and least understood aspects of what this rock formation does. What infrasound does to the human body. Infrasound is sound at frequencies below 20 hertz below the threshold at which the human audiary system consciously registers sound as something being heard.

[00:05:36]It is produced by a wide range of natural phenomena including wind moving across and through topographic features, mountain ranges, ocean wave activity, earthquakes, and geological formations with specific internal geometries.

[00:05:56]It can travel very long distances with minimal loss of energy. And at sufficient pressure levels, it produces effects in the human body that have been formally documented in scientific literature.

[00:06:13]Those effects include a sense of unease or dread that the person experiencing it cannot attribute to a specific cause.

[00:06:24]physical vibration felt in [music] the chest, the abdomen, and behind the eyes.

[00:06:31]Disorientation, an inability to concentrate, a heightened sense of alertness indistinguishable from fear, and in some documented cases, a strong impression of a presence nearby that does not correspond to any visible entity. These are not supernatural descriptions.

[00:06:55]They are the documented physiological responses to infrasound exposure that researchers have measured in controlled settings and that have been proposed as explanations for the feelings of unease reported [music] at specific locations around the world, including ancient stone monuments, specific caves, and geological formations with internal void structures.

[00:07:26]Kolkajjaka has not been formally measured for infrasound.

[00:07:31]No research team has placed infrasound detection equipment at the site and run a formal study of what frequencies the boulder system produces.

[00:07:43]What can be said based on the known physics of infrasound production and the documented structure of the kalajjaka formation is that the conditions for infrasound production are present there in unusual abundance.

[00:07:59]Subscribe now because the next section is where the physics of what this mountain is doing become significantly more unsettling than the stories people usually tell about it. Why the geometry of the formation matters? Infrasound is [music] produced when air moves through or across structures with specific geometrical properties. The size and shape of a passage, chamber, or void determines what frequencies are produced when air moves through it. Different geometries produce different frequencies.

[00:08:38]A collection of voids of varying dimensions connected in complex ways with air moving through all of them simultaneously at different speeds and in different directions produces a wide range of low frequency tones simultaneously.

[00:08:57]The Kajjaka boulder system is a collection of thousands of irregular passages, chambers, deadend voids, and interconnected spaces created by millions of tons of stacked granite boulders.

[00:09:14]No two passages are the same dimension.

[00:09:17]The spaces range from narrow slits a few cm wide to chambers large enough to stand inside.

[00:09:25]Wind entering the formation from any direction encounters this complex three-dimensional array of passages and is split, redirected, compressed, and channeled through hundreds of different [music] geometric shapes simultaneously.

[00:09:44]This is precisely the structural description of an infrasound generator.

[00:09:50]Not by design, not by intention, by geometry.

[00:09:55]The specific shape of what 260 million years of geological process has produced at Kkajjaka is from a physics perspective a structure that would produce low frequency sound across a range of frequencies when wind moves through it including frequencies below the threshold of human hearing including frequencies that produce the documented physiological effects described above.

[00:10:25]No research team [music] has confirmed this at Calka.

[00:10:30]It is a hypothesis that fits the known physics and the documented witness accounts. It is not an established [music] fact. But the absence of formal measurement is itself significant.

[00:10:46]a formation that has been producing documented sounds for over 150 years of European contact and for an unknown period before that has never been formally [music] acoustically analyzed.

[00:11:01]Nobody has placed a microphone inside the boulder system [music] and run a frequency analysis.

[00:11:09]Nobody has measured what kajjaka is producing at the low end of the sound spectrum.

[00:11:17]The equipment to do this exists. The site is accessible.

[00:11:22]The [music] study has not been done.

[00:11:26]What lives inside the formation and what it produces. The ghost bat macroerma geigers is the only carnivorous bat species in Australia. It roosts inside the Kajjaka boulder system in significant numbers, hunting frogs, lizards, birds, and other bats inside the passages in complete darkness. The ghost bat navigates by echolocation, producing ultrasonic pulses at frequencies above the threshold of human hearing, which bounce off surfaces and return information about the surrounding environment.

[00:12:06]Echolocation pulses from a colony of ghost bats hunting inside a complex stone passage system produce a continuous high frequency acoustic environment inside the formation. This is above the human hearing range. So it is not consciously registered by anyone entering the passages. But the human auditory system does not respond only to frequencies within the conscious hearing range. Ultrasonic and infrasonic frequencies both produce physiological responses even when they are not consciously perceived as sound. A person entering a passage system where ghost bats are echolocating at high intensity is entering an environment with significant acoustic content that they cannot hear but that their nervous system is nonetheless responding to.

[00:13:05]This adds a layer to the documented accounts of visitors feeling watched, followed, or accompanied by something they cannot see inside the Kolkaka boulder system. The ghost bat was there before them. It knew they were coming before they arrived, and its echolocation pulses were hitting them continuously from the moment they entered the passages.

[00:13:34]The foul gas angle. Multiple accounts of time spent near Kolkajaka include references to an unusual smell described variously as sulfurous, stale, or simply wrong in a way that is difficult to characterize.

[00:13:52]This detail appears across enough separate accounts to be taken seriously as a consistent phenomenon rather than individual misperception.

[00:14:04]Geological gas release from fractured rock systems is a documented phenomenon.

[00:14:10]Granite formations with extensive internal fracture networks can release trace amounts of radon and other gases through those fractures as thermal cycling expands and contracts the rock.

[00:14:24]Some of these gases are odless. Others have a faint sulfurous character. None of them at the trace concentrations produced by geological release in an outdoor setting are immediately dangerous.

[00:14:39]But their presence has two implications for understanding Kolkjaka.

[00:14:45]The first is that some of the odor accounts are likely real rather than imagined representing actual geological gas release from a formation with an extensive internal fracture network.

[00:15:00]The second is that geological gas release of this type is often associated with pzosismic activity. the mechanical stress produced in rock by geological pressure which itself produces infrasound [music] as a byproduct. If kajaka's fracture system is producing geological gas release, the same mechanical processes producing that release may also be contributing to the infrasonic output of the formation.

[00:15:34]What the cuckoo yangi have always known.

[00:15:38]The cuckoo yolangi people did not need acoustic physics to understand that kajjaka speaks. Their relationship with the sounds of this country is as old as their occupation of it which predates every European account by thousands of years.

[00:15:59]The sounds of the mountain are incorporated into the understanding of the place as a living entity, an ancestral presence whose communications are expressed through the landscape itself.

[00:16:15]When Cuku Yalangji elders have spoken publicly about Kolkajaka, they describe a place that is active rather than passive, that makes itself known to those who come near it and whose communications are not incidental but intentional within the framework of their cultural understanding.

[00:16:39]The moaning in the night, the sudden percussive detonations, the vibrations that visitors feel in their bodies without understanding why are not inexplicable [music] within the cuckoo yalangji framework.

[00:16:55]They are the expected behavior of a place that has a nature, a character, and a way of expressing both.

[00:17:06]What the physics of infrasound, thermal expansion, eolocation and geological gas release offers is not a reputation of that understanding.

[00:17:18]It is a parallel description of the same phenomena using different language and different conceptual frameworks.

[00:17:28]Both descriptions point at the same thing. A formation that produces effects in the people who come near it that are real, measurable, and consistent across every account from every source across every decade for which records exist.

[00:17:48]The measurements that would formally establish what Kolkajaka is producing acoustically have not been made.

[00:17:58]The study that would characterize the full frequency output of the boulder system under various wind conditions has not been funded or conducted.

[00:18:10]The formation will keep producing its sounds regardless of whether anyone measures them.

[00:18:17]It has been doing so for 260 million years. The question of what exactly it is saying and in what range of frequencies remains open.